Chris Gray

speaker

586 appearances 5 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 11 Jun

Chris Gray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 3.

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Newscast · Why Has Defence Secretary John Healey Resigned? · 11 Jun 2026 podcast

Well, I think the by-election campaign in Makerfield has, for the last couple of weeks, put something of a cork in the bottle of that story that we were telling on Newscast a couple of weeks ago, when there were the resignations and there was talk of whether an MP would get 81 MPs in order to challenge the Prime Minister and all that kind of stuff.

And then Andy Burnham finds a seat that he can fight and a by-election campaign gets underway.

And let me point newscasters in the direction of the full list of candidates on the BBC News website.

And things felt like they had returned to a brief period of vague normality at Westminster, where you had the prime minister trying to outwardly project a sense of getting on with the job.

And by the way, trying to get this out of the door was a case study in trying to do precisely that.

precisely that alongside what we're expecting about social media for younger people and clamp down on that perhaps coming early early next week but where there was this as I say cork in the bottle that was almost sort of

repressing that wider conversation because there was a recognition within the Labour Party that it couldn't properly resume until the by-election had either returned Andy Burnham to Westminster or hadn't and then the party could resume the conversation in the light of those circumstances.

I think in reality a already very weak Prime Minister has been weakened further by this.

I think if it wasn't for the by-election, certainly what I'm picking up from

Labour MPs if it wasn't for the by-election we'd be in the zone if we hadn't been already around how long he would stick around for etc etc and it clearly you know everything else being equal weakens that argument about you know his desire to press on etc etc because one of the

conditions of even being able to vaguely contemplate that i think was him managing to hold the cabinet together now the loss of one cabinet minister is not necessarily instantly terminal but it's off the back of the loss of west streeting is with this countdown to make a field uh a week uh a week away and that heightened sense i'm picking up as we chat

That, yeah, we get the other side of that by-election.

And irrespective of outcome, we're straight back to where we were a month or so-ish ago with a raging conversation about...

who might soon be our new Prime Minister.

And because the Makerfield by-election is slightly strange for reasons we've discussed many times, I'm sure Robert Kenyon, the Reform UK candidate, will be asked what he thinks about the defence investment plan and which areas of capital spending in other government departments should be cut to pay for it next time he does a phone-in or appears on BBC Radio Manchester.

So, Chris, thank you very much.

Ta.

And Shashank, thanks to you too.

Thanks very much.

And here's our own newscast tribute to John Healy, the outgoing Defence Secretary, because when he was on this podcast a few weeks ago talking about the threat posed by Russian ships in British waters, I had to ask him to confirm a story first reported in the New Statesman that he carries everywhere he goes with him around the world on unofficial and official business alike, a little bottle of HP sauce.

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